


Enough

by musamihi



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Infidelity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-27
Updated: 2012-10-27
Packaged: 2017-11-17 03:06:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/546968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Both accustomed to being wronged, Greg and Molly find they're right for one another – but Sherlock's fall changes everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Enough

The early autumn rain and the failure of his makeshift umbrella – a half-soaked copy of _Metro_ – drive Greg underground to the thronged and stuffy Northern line platform at King's Cross. At first he doesn't see her, occupied as he is with smearing the runaway ink off his wet hands onto his (arguably) water-resistant coat. But then an anonymous elbow jostles him and he raises his head, undecided between an apology and an irritated glare, and there she is; tiny with her arms hooked tight around her purse, hunched into the middle of the crowd. She's seen him, that much is obvious from the way she's studying the map on the opposite wall as though it's brand new to her. But she hasn't sought him out, and she doesn't seem like she's about to do.

That wounds him. But he's got no right, of course. No right to feel small just because she won't look at him. No right to miss her at all.

When the train comes clattering in and he sees Molly's face reflected back to him in a flickering rush of speeding windows, he watches until her eyes meet his, just for a moment, in the scuffed and foggy glass.

And then he gets into the carriage behind hers and tries to put her out of his mind by scratching the newspaper print out from under his fingernails.

***

"Wait," he said, and wasn't that just a fine time to be developing scruples? He was in her flat, for Christ's sake – his hands were both sunk into her hair, turning her delicate face up to his mouth, and one strap of her dress had fallen aside to curl softly around the top of her arm. Her fingers were wound into the front of his shirt and her chest was rising breathlessly against his own. God, but he was an idiot.

She pursed her lips (red, red like that wrapping paper), a veil of doubt falling over her expression. "What's – I'm sorry, I didn't –"

"No." His hands fell to her shoulders, but he lifted them again almost immediately, pulling them through his hair and turning to lean against the back of her couch. _What the hell are you doing_ , he thought, and he didn't know whether he was more upset with himself for kissing her or for stopping. "I'm sorry. I really shouldn't have –" _– seen you home, come up for coffee, said Sherlock was a blockhead who didn't know what he was missing._ "I had too much to drink. I'm sorry."

"Yeah, me too." Her voice was small and shaking and bitter, and the way she snatched her strap back up over her shoulder was like ice to the back of his neck. "Sorry. I'm just being stupid, I'll …" She dropped into silence, straightening her hair with an almost frantic energy, tugging her dress down over her thigh where he'd ridden it up with his knee. Her eyes were hidden from him, fixed on the floor behind long, made-up lashes, and her face was flat and set and miserable, and he couldn't have felt any worse if he'd slapped her.

Something moved on the periphery of his vision, and he turned to watch the cat hop down from a bookshelf and disappear into the kitchen. He opened his mouth to say that he should be going home, but it stuck inside of him. _Yes, better get home. Better not keep Michelle waiting. She wouldn't like that._

Molly's phone buzzed, loud and harsh against her keys. She bent awkwardly over the couch to fish it out of her purse, no doubt as glad for the interruption as he was. Her shoulders froze in their forward stoop, and before she could turn the screen against her palm he saw the name attached to the text – _Sherlock_.

For a moment the only sound was the cat chasing its food around its metal bowl, its collar scraping carelessly along the edge. Then Molly's phone went off again – another text – and Greg stood, focusing on nothing but fetching his coat, which he'd discarded a few minutes before on a chair near the door. "I should go. I'm sorry."

Molly nodded, her mouth flattening slightly as she swallowed. "It's – right, it's okay. I'll, um …" She never looked away from her phone, but there was something softer in her face as her shoulders drooped, the twist to her mouth less cynical than sad. "I'll see you around."

Greg let himself out, the tails of his coat catching between his legs in his hurry down the stairs.

***

The rain has let up when he meets her in the street later that afternoon, but the aggressively gray sky keeps everyone on the run for shelter. After the awkward near-miss this morning, he's inclined to turn and flee before she sees him, but this time they spot one another without a shred of plausible deniability, face-to-face. They're stopped at the same crossing, and traffic is too heavy to risk walking against the light.

Not that throwing himself into traffic is entirely unappealing. He dredges up a tight smile, and she – after looking blank for a moment and glancing around as though expecting to find something (help?) – returns it.

"Hey," he says, feeling a bit as though he's forgotten how to speak English. "Nasty day."

"It really is," she agrees, because what _else_ is she going to do? She's clutching the lapel of her short jacket with one white, stiff hand. "Um – how are you?"

Sweet, as always. Even in small talk. "Oh, I'm all right. Just another day running around – you know." He pauses, and then says what he's thinking, even though it's wretchedly unfair. "I haven't seen you in a while."

"No," she replies, perhaps a bit aloof but not half as affronted as she should be. "No, well –"

The light changes, and they all pour into the street. They're separated for a moment by a woman dragging a piece of rolling luggage. At the other side of the road they falter; they're going different ways. 

Molly gestures vaguely to the left. "Well, I'm …"

"Right." Greg waves, and tries not to notice how relieved she looks. "Take care."

He watches her turn and race away, and for a few seconds he lets himself imagine following her. But it only puts him in mind of that long, windy walk home on Christmas Eve, of slinking into his own house like an errant dog, and in the end he pivots on his heel and goes about his business. He hates himself for wanting her back, but he's an old hand at that. It's nothing he can't live with.

***

The morning brought a cool, sinking breeze through the open windows, and Greg woke up to Molly tucked close against his chest, her face pressed into the dip below his collarbone. He'd kicked the blankets down during the night, and either she slept too deeply or was too sensitive a hostess to pull them back up. He reached down to do it for her, easing his arm around her shoulders with the hem of the sheet.

It wasn't the first time he'd stayed over, but it was the first time he'd planned to. _You don't have to do this,_ she'd told him last night as they were settling into the third hour of _Dexter_ DVDs – anything to avoid the news – and finishing off a bottle of wine. _I'm not afraid, you know._

_That must be nice,_ he'd replied. She and Sherlock could both tell him that Moriarty wouldn't bother with her anymore, but he didn’t want to take a chance on a man who'd just engineered his own acquittal after the crime of the century, a man who'd sat here and put his arm around her while his hostages languished, waiting to be blown to pieces. So he'd asked to stay the night, and she'd smiled and said she'd order in.

The cat scratched at the door. Greg ignored it. He'd been slowly coming to terms with the thing ever since he'd come back from Dartmoor sufficiently hopped up on experimental chemical weapons to ask Molly if she fancied having dinner with him, but he hadn't yet spent enough mornings in her bed that he was willing to share. She, however, seemed to have some sort of link to it; a few seconds later she was stirring, lifting her head and reaching up to push her hair back away from her face.

"Morning," he said, stroking his thumb along the side of her waist, over the thin, yellow T-shirt she wore to bed. 

"Hello," she murmured with a smile against the bare skin of his chest before propping herself lazily up on her elbows. "Toby wants in."

"Toby's a big boy." Greg set his hand on her abdomen, sliding his fingers just slightly up under the end of her shirt. "He can get his own breakfast."

"What about you? Want some eggs?"

He did not, particularly. Anything that threatened to move her out of bed was pretty low on his list. She felt soft and small and wonderful and he saw no reason to shake things up. "Maybe later, hm?"

That was clear enough, apparently. She settled beside him again, laying her head just below his chin. "Thanks. For staying over."

"You all right?" Concern – and something else – swelled his chest, and he slid his hand up the ridge of her spine to the nape of her neck.

"Yes." She said it heavily, confidently, the way she only said anything when she meant it to be understood (which sometimes overlapped with when she wasn't quite sure, he'd noticed). Any doubts he might have had fled his mind, in any case, when he felt her mouth on the underside of his jaw, her lips parted against his throat, her tongue testing his skin, slow and almost shy in that way that always, always went right to the middle of him. She stopped with a nervous little laugh. "But you fell asleep on me, you know. Last night."

"Yeah? Shame on me." He shifted a bit further onto his side, leaning over her to look – perhaps not _too_ hard – for any signs that this was … a distraction. A change of subject. "I told you, that show wears me out. It's creepy."

She giggled. "It isn't. I think it's sweet –"

"Well, you're a bit of a weirdo."

"And you're awfully sensitive, for a big, scary policeman."

He grinned, slipping his hand down across the soft, smooth skin beneath her shirt. "You like it."

"Maybe," she laughed, a sound that hitched in the middle with an added rush of breath when his fingers found their way between her legs, sliding lightly – not that he'd admit to teasing – over the thin fabric of her underwear. The soft insides of her thighs closed around his hand, at once cool and eager. He sank in to kiss her, pleased in the light of day to find everything almost as it had been the day before – to find nothing too drastically changed. The danger he'd feared had been there all along, after all; its mask had simply dropped yesterday, and in some ways, that was better – wasn't it? For the first time in a very long while there was no one scattering deception in his path, and everything appeared as it was, the street laid out for him in morning light outside the open window.

***

It's when he stops in to get himself some takeaway for supper – he's had a hard day and deserves a break from cooking, he's sure – that he begins to wonder just who's got it in for him. There, again, is Molly, just handing over her cash and taking her receipt. His cowardly urge to back out is thwarted less by his own sense of decency than the stream of people walking in behind him. When she sees him, her brow creases as though it simply can't bear any more weight.

"I'm not –" He lowers his voice, waits until the latest flow of customers has moved past them, and leans in with an apologetic bend to his shoulders. "I promise I'm not following you."

She nods with a grimace, speaking to the bag in her hand rather than to him. "I know. Look –"

He's standing between her and the door, he realises, and moves out of the way to plant himself in the queue, instead. "Sorry."

"Will you – can you stop by after dinner?" she asks in a grim rush, with none of her usual anxious energy. She looks too tired even to be nervous. 

A couple of months ago that would have been more than reason enough to insist on coming over and showing her an easy night. Now it just makes him ache. "Molly …"

"Just – later. Whenever you've got the time. Just come by."

"I really have to –"

"Greg – please."

He of all people knows how hard it can be to say that; and so he nods, and watches her push her way unhappily out the door, and finds he's lost his appetite entirely.

***

It took him ten minutes to get out of the car.

He'd parked it around the corner from Molly's – not _exactly_ legally, but no one was going to give him trouble. It was the first day of July. Music blasted by him in waves as each pulse of traffic passed, leaving him swimming in distorted sound and the rumbling gaps between. Still he sat, hands on the wheel, and let his mind spin like tyres in mud.

All the signs were there. A sudden and frequent demand for late hours at work. Coded calls, polite and mundane in language but deeply significant in tone. Blanks in the day, hours unaccounted for, things she might once have let him coax out of her as he rubbed her back on the sofa, but that she now met with an impenetrable _no, nothing happened today_. A certain distance punctuated by bouts of desperate clinging that he was all too happy to indulge.

It had started the day Sherlock died, and so of course he'd thought it was just grief, anger, guilt, the same morass he was wading through. But grief didn't make a person lie about where she'd spent the night. Grief didn't explain calls from _co-workers_ at two in the morning.

It was happening again.

He'd thought, at first, that perhaps he could live with it. He'd done so before, after all. He'd known about Michelle's lovers for a year before he confronted her, and he'd stayed another decade before finally deciding he'd had enough. How bad could this be? Wouldn't it be worse to be alone? Especially now, with everything falling apart around him – well, so what if he needed someone? Whose business was it if having someone to wake up with meant more to him than having something perfect?

Fooling himself again, however, proved too difficult. He was too fresh from the caustic resentment that had been the end of his marriage to believe he could just turn a blind eye. He couldn't do it again, and he'd come here to tell her so.

When he finally worked himself up to going inside, though, he found little in the way of conversation. Her only reply to his first, gruff demand was exhausted silence; calmer words achieved nothing better than an ashen pallor and a face so _spent_ it fairly broke his heart. When at last he started pleading, as he'd known he would – _please, please just tell me_ – she covered her mouth with her hands and told him he should go.

He drove back to his flat alone, and alone he stayed.

***

Toby is the first to greet him, as always. Molly shoos the cat inside and Greg follows her to the sitting room. They stop beside the sofa. She doesn't sit; neither does he. She's closed off from him, facing half away and gripping her elbows as though her life depended on it, so when she opens her mouth to say _I want you to come back,_ all he can do for a moment is stare.

"Whatever _that_ was," he says after a horrible hesitation, careful, dreading the confession, "has it stopped?"

She shakes her head, eyes shut. "I still can't tell you –"

" _Jesus_ , Molly."

"Well I _can't_!" Her arms fly down to her sides as she whirls to face him, a colour rising to her face that he's surprised to recognise as anger. "It's not my fault, and it isn't fair – you think I want to sneak around, you think I like the way it made you act like – like I was some kind of stranger?" The outburst comes in a sudden storm, and the tears reddening her eyes are a shock – he's never seen her cry, not even after the funeral. "I'm so – I'm so sodding _tired_ of keeping it all to myself, and at least when you were here that was something, but now it's – it's constant, and it _isn't fair_." 

He's pulled her in against himself in a reflexive sort of gesture before he can think of what any of it means; and while she sniffles against his shirt and tries with indignant hands to wipe the tears from her face, all he can think is that he's the same stupid, weak idiot he's always been. It should take more than crying and entreaties to change his mind. It should take something real. It should take promises and proof.

But maybe this _is_ more. The bone-weary breaking of her voice, the defeat in the shuddering of her shoulders … She's in pain, whatever the reason. That much is real. 

Maybe it's enough.

"Is it," he asks, ducking his chin to look down at her where she's collecting her breathing, "is it someone else?"

"Please don't ask," she whispers, pressing her forehead so hard against his sternum it begins to sting. "Please, just stay."

So he does. And he finds it difficult, as she's falling asleep on his lap to the sound of nothing but the rain dripping against the windowsill, to care very much about all the good reasons why he shouldn't.


End file.
